Event
This in-person event, which took place at the V&A South Kensington in February 2025, brought together two cultural professionals who have been working in Afghanistan for over seventeen years to discuss their work, engagement with local communities across the country, and the role heritage protection can play as an integral part of peacebuilding and reconciliation processes.
Event
This in-person event at the V&A South Kensington, convened by the museum’s Culture in Crisis Programme in partnership with World Monuments Fund Britain in January 2025, drew together speakers to discuss emergent risks to heritage and the announcement of the 2025 Watch. From the British Isles to North and Sub-Saharan Africa, they explored case studies from Watch lists old and new, exploring successes, challenges and some of the changes seen over the past decades – and look ahead to a new cycle of work about to begin.
Conference
On 20 September 2024, The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Culture in Crisis Programme, in partnership with University of Stirling and V&A Dundee, staged this international conference at V&A Dundee, Scotland. The conference critically examined politically motivated, intentional damage and destruction of cultural heritage. Such acts become part of the ongoing biographies of heritage objects, monuments and places, creating difficult and contentious dilemmas about their future lives for those involved in caring for them. The conference provided an important forum for comparing historical and contemporary examples and reflecting on the consequences of different conservation, restoration and documentation policies and practices, with a view to shaping future directions.
The full event programme can be found here: https://sway.cloud.microsoft/LXuVVfVWXvgo52bm?ref=Link
Event
The London Festival of Architecture (LFA), the V&A’s Culture in Crisis Programme, International National Trust Organisation and World Monuments Fund were pleased to work together to organise the event ‘Future-Proofing Heritage: Sustainability and Resilience.’ This in-person event, hosted at the V&A in South Kensington, London, explored different case studies and approaches to the risks that heritage structures face. Through this event we brought together the voices of heritage preservation specialists working around the world, each embarked on projects that dealt with heritage buildings and structures at risk and what steps are being taken to preserve and sustain these important monuments to our past.
Webinar
The first webinar was on the subject of Fire featured Nina Kjølsen Jernæs (Paintings Conservator at NIKU, the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research) and Emma Coburn (Heritage Lead for Programmes, Resourcing and Risk at the Houses of Parliament) who discussed the latest research on fire protective textiles for heritage collections and reflections on the 2020 Watts Gallery fire.